Super Bowl

More than any other sporting event in America, the Super Bowl has truly become a cultural phenomenon. According to 1999 National Football League figures, more than 138 million people in the United States alone watched the Super Bowl, with over 750 million total Super Bowl viewers in 187 countries. The Super Bowl has become, according to writer Michael Real (as quoted in Dona Schwartz's Contesting the Super Bowl), a "mythic spectacle," that "in the classical manner of mythical beliefs and ritual activities. . .is a communal celebration of and indoctrination into specific socially dominant emotions, life-styles, and values." The Super Bowl brings together several institutions: sports, television, advertising, and the American corporate culture. The Super Bowl serves as an end-of-the-season celebration, glorifying revenues accumulated by team owners, advertisers, media outlets, and many other businesses that share in the tremendous profits generated by professional football.

The Super Bowl itself stems from a fierce rivalry between two football leagues. In 1960, the upstart American Football League (AFL) challenged the popular and well-established National Football League (NFL). The AFL was well funded and soon began to contest the NFL in a bidding war for college players. In 1965, the AFL scored its first major coup when the New York Jets signed University of Alabama star quarterback Joe Namath. Namath's personality, media appeal, and on-field success gave the AFL an early degree of legitimacy. The AFL was also helped by a television contract. Under an exclusive deal with the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), each AFL team was paid $150,000, money that kept the league afloat during the difficult, early years of its existence.

In 1966, the AFL decided to further assert itself by attempting to sign established, veteran NFL players. When several of its stars signed lucrative contracts, the NFL found it had little choice but to accept the situation and started working on a merger of the two leagues. In June 1966, an NFL-AFL merger was announced. The merger called for a common draft of college players and a championship game--the Super Bowl--to start in 1967. The new league would be called the National Football League with the previous rivals split into two divisions: the National Football Conference (NFC) and the American Football Conference (AFC). The full merger would take place in 1970. The Super Bowl pitted the winners of the two conferences in one game in late January, following the regular season and a series of playoff games.

During the first few years of the new National Football League, the two conferences maintained separate identities and schedules. Initially then, the Super Bowl became a contest where the upstart AFL would try to prove its meddle against more established teams. As might be expected, in the first two Super Bowls (Super Bowls I and II), the NFL Green Bay Packers easily defeated their AFL opponents. Most believed it would take years before an AFL team would actually win a Super Bowl. Then in Super Bowl III, the AFL champion New York Jets were matched against the powerful Baltimore Colts. Jets quarterback "Broadway Joe" Namath, on the eve of the contest in which the Colts were heavily favored, "guaranteed" a Jets victory. On January 12, 1969, the Jets stunned the sports world by defeating the Colts 16-7. The Jets victory finally gave the AFL its due and helped bring the two leagues together when the merger officially began the next year.

Enhancing the merger of the two leagues in 1970 was a television package from ABC. For just over $8 million each season, ABC agreed to televise thirteen prime-time games on Monday nights. Television revenues for the NFL totaled nearly $150 million. Overall, it meant that each of the twenty-six NFL teams in 1970 would receive about $1.7 million. The popularity of football stemmed primarily from its television exposure. During the 1970s, television transformed football into America's premier spectator sport. Before the 1973 season, Congress lifted TV blackouts on home games that were not sold out. While some predicted that this legislation would make it hard for some small market teams to fill the stands, that did not prove to be the case. Not only did TV viewing increase, but teams actually sold more tickets. And it was TV contracts that became the meal ticket for the NFL--not single game sales. In 1978, the NFL signed the most lucrative sports TV contract ever. In January of that year, a Lou Harris poll found that 70 percent of the nation's sports fans followed football, compared to 54 percent who followed baseball.

With the help of television, over the past three decades the game on the field has become just an ancillary part of the entire Super Bowl experience. More than anything else however, the Super Bowl is about money and corporate advertising. This January spectacle is the most lucrative sporting event in the United States and has become as much an advertising contest as a sports production. The NFL sold the broadcast rights for the 1999 Super Bowl for over $60 million and NFL properties, the licensing arm of the league, sells approximately $200 million in merchandise for the game. At the Super Bowl itself, logo placement, advertising angles, and television commercials have taken on more importance than the outcome of the game. In fact, television commercials slated for the Super Bowl are often shown as news items on local broadcasts days before the game. There are even postgame telecasts that examine and evaluate the quality of Super Bowl commercials.